Royal Asiatic Society China in Shanghai

RAS China in Shanghai - Newsletter Vol 3 No 9 – October 2012
2
“Non, Je ne regrette rien…”
Michelle Blumenthal – Obituary
18 th November 1958 – 20 th August 2012
“Michelle was listening to Edith Piaf when everybody else was listening to Rod Stewart,”
says Jolene Lasker who has known her since age 4.
Perhaps Piaf’s song was with Michelle in the minutes before she passed away in the
Adventist hospital in Hong Kong on the morning of August 20, 2012.
Michelle was a truly international citizen. She came from a tradition of peripatetic
forbearers. Michelle’s parents, Arthur Blumenthal and Julia Losman were born in South
Africa, as was Michelle, but Arthur and Julia’s parents were born elsewhere, and Michelle
was raised to rove the planet.
Arthur’s parents came from Ireland and from Latvia. Julia’s parents hailed mainly from
Eastern Europe. Michelle’s maternal grandfather, Morris Losman, escaped the pogroms of
Eastern Europe as a teenager, hidden under the vegetables in a cart and got on the first
boat he could. He landed in Cape Town.
Michelle’s maternal grandmother, Fanny Jacobson, had an interesting history. Her father,
Jacob Jacobson, came from Eastern Europe and travelled South Africa, selling his wares.
He came to a village, Bredarsdorp, in the Cape, and met and fell in love with Maria
Groenewald, a young woman of proper Afrikaaner stock. Maria became Esther Gordon,
learned Yiddish and Hebrew and converted to Judaism, cutting off all reference to her
Afrikaaner past. She kept a strictly kosher home.
Michelle, the first grandchild always admired Fanny. At a tender age, Michelle found it
difficult to pronounce the Yiddish word for grandmother, ‘Booba’ (BAW-BEH), and said
‘Bobo’, and the name stuck. She admired Bobo’s fierce intellectual independence, and
Bobo remained a committed Marxist until the day she died aged 98.
Michelle grew up in a sleepy hollow called Camps Bay, one of the most beautiful places on
earth. Her father, Arthur Blumenthal still lives in the family home, at the foot of Table
Mountain and a stone’s throw from the beach. Michelle attended school in Camps Bay.
Michelle loved it there, but ached for a bigger canvas. She moved to Johannesburg in the
early eighties, and then left South Africa shortly after to seek her fortune as a commodities
trader in Hong Kong.
It was there that she met and fell in love with Steve Lazarus. They married in the mid-
1980s in Vancouver, Canada, where his family lived. They continued living in Hong Kong
and then moved to London at the end of the 1980s.
Michelle was excited by the prospect of Steve’s transfer with Citibank to Tokyo in 1990.
They packed up their home. On the day that the boxes were collected, Steve tragically
died of a heart attack.
Michelle loved Steve deeply. She was devastated, and never remarried. She spent the
following years in Vancouver and then returned to live in London for a period. She
struggled to find her feet. She enrolled in a post-graduate diploma course offered by
Christie’s on the arts.
Then in the mid-1990s, she travelled East again. She had met Shanghai before, but
gradually, the city became a new love.